Model cash flows, and decide what represents an amount of cash

Nothing in the tree models cash. Four knowledge pages describe it — cash, cash flow, cash position and linked cash — and no component has a table, a domain class or a link for any of them. This capture is the analysis that has to happen before one is built.

The question is what represents an amount of cash. Three shapes are on the table:

• A cash flow: a dated amount, in a currency, with a direction against the trade or the book that explains it. This is the detail a stream decomposes into.
• A trade that represents cash. ORE prices a CashPosition, which carries a currency and an amount, and the knowledge page calls it "the trade representation of an amount of cash", stand-alone or as a component of a total return swap. A system or dummy trade of this kind is what a sweep, a netting or a summarisation run would book.
• Both: the flows as detail, and a cash trade as the aggregate the engine and the ledger act on.

Three pieces of work already in flight depend on the answer.

• Linked cash. The page says some cash explains a trade and some stands alone. The typed links task in flight joins two trades, so it cannot carry a trade-to-cash relation, and linked cash stays out of its seed until this is settled.
• Summary cash and orphan cash. Summarisation strips settled cash into summary deals and orphans the children. Nothing holds either today.
• The processes that move cash. The funding roll, the spot sweep and the profit cleardown all generate cash movements. They wait on the run model, and every one of them will need somewhere to put the cash.

• Is a cash flow an entity of its own, or a projection computed from the trades and instruments that produce it?
• Does a cash trade need the whole trade envelope, or is it a record the aggregation reports happen to read alongside trades?
• If it is a trade, what does it reference, and does it carry an instrument?
• How is summary cash held, and what orphans the children it replaces?
• Does a cash flow point at the trade that explains it, or does the trade carry its flows?
• What does ORE need in order to value a cash position? ORE is the ground truth for what can be priced, so the answer constrains the model.

• Cash — the asset class.
• Cash flow — the magnitude and the direction.
• Cash position — the trade representation of an amount of cash, and its ORE product.
• Linked cash — the cash a trade explains, and the drill-down from a balance to the trades behind it.

• Join trades with typed links — the task that has to leave linked cash out until this is settled.
• Trace a process run and the trade groups it creates — the run whose groups the processes that move cash will carry.
• Tom/Next, Spot Sweep and Central remittance — the three processes that generate cash today.